In the fall of 1918, as the First World War ground toward its armistice, a second catastrophe moved through army camps, cities, and rural towns with far less warning: an influenza strain that would kill an estimated 50 million people worldwide before it burned out. The film follows the outbreak through the accounts of the people who lived it, including children left orphaned within weeks as parents fell sick and died in the same house. Period photographs, letters, and newspaper reports trace how quickly ordinary life broke down, from overwhelmed hospitals to makeshift morgues, while historians place the pandemic against the backdrop of a war that helped spread it across continents and censored its coverage at home. The film pays particular attention to the domestic aftermath, the households and communities left to absorb sudden mass loss with none of the medical tools that would later make influenza manageable. It is a portrait of a disaster that killed more people than the war it accompanied, told mostly through the voices left behind.